Revival: Studies in the Napoleonic Wars (1929)

Charles Oman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351243896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book presents a general summary of the views on the history of the world held by various historians' perspective. Rest of the book is derived from author's main work of 20 years on the Napoleonic period.

Narrative includes four stories of the Secret Service that illustrate in different fashions the underworld of political and military intrigue which escapes notice in other general history work.

Some of the material included in this book is derived from the study of the British tactics before the Peninsular War and helps to comprehend Duke of Wellington's methods of warfare with Napoleon and his armies. Discussion is included on Napoleon's system of using his cavalry as a generalization with a specific study of the handling of the cavalry by his generals in the Spanish War.

Studies in the Napoleonic Wars

I
Historical Perspective: Man’s Outlook on History

The moment that man begins to think about something more than the passing trifles and troubles of his daily life, and starts, consciously or unconsciously, to make generalizations about himself and his neighbours, their ends and objects, their past and future, he has begun to look at things in perspective. And when he extends his survey so as to draw deductions from all that he knows about the past records of mankind, he is trying to look at the world in historical perspective. It may be that his survey extends over no greater space of time than a generation or two—“Tales of a Grandfather” may be the limit of his knowledge. Or, on the other hand, he may know—or may think that he knows—the whole history of mankind since the Creation—if he ties himself down to the idea of a Creation—down to the all-important present day. Such was the happy conviction of Orosius in A.D. 417, and of Mr. H. G. Wells in A.D. 1925. But whether his horizon of knowledge be long or short, whether it be a hundred years or a hundred aeons, the man who has started to generalize about his own position in universal history is constructing for himself an historical perspective.

What are the things that determine a man’s outlook on the past and the future? I do not mean only the outlook that the historian (or would-be historian) takes, but the conceptions that governed the mind of the average man of various epochs down to our own day. It must be remembered that there are sharp breaks in the history of human thought concerning the past and the future, consequent on outward happenings in some cases, and on mental and spiritual changes in others. The conception of world-history was wholly different for a Roman of the reign of Augustus and a Roman of the reign of Honorius—but was the change more due to the collapse of the Empire under the Barbarian Invasions, or to the triumph of the Christian over the old official Pagan ideal? Or again, the outlook of an ordinarily intelligent Frenchman, Englishman, or German in 1450 was completely different from that of his great-grandson in 1600—but was that the result of the complex cultural changes which (for want of a better word) we call the Renaissance, and of the discovery of America and the Indies, and of countless advances in science? Or was it, in the main, the result of that great spiritual phenomenon which (again for want of a better word) we call the Reformation?

It is well worth while to take into consideration what are the main things that have governed man’s conception of the progress of events, and the way that such conception governs his conduct in his own day. The beginnings of unconscious historical perspective came early; we may trace them in Homer and Hesiod and the Pentateuch, even in the surviving scraps of Assyrian and Egyptian records. A hint that an impious and tyrannical king “who does not that which is right in the sight of the Lord” means a ruined people, or that civil wars are deplorable, or that a corrupt oligarchy ends in a revolution, may be “glimpses of the obvious”; but historical perspective is beginning when the poet or the scribe or the annalist sets down such things as accepted facts, and applies them as warnings to the polities of his own day. Presently we reach the stage when the scribe works these observed phenomena into a little constitutional essay, as does Herodotus when—under the easy fiction of a debate among seven Persian nobles on forms of government—he discusses the advantages and disadvantages of oligarchy, democracy, and monarchy. Here historical perspective has ripened into definite promulgation of doctrine. And Herodotus is only a hundred years distant from Aristotle, who was able to set forth the doctrine of the rise, progress, and decay of states (of all kinds) with a perfection of judgement that none of his successors in the sphere of political philosophy has ever surpassed. Though moderns like Montesquieu or Lord Bryce have had the advantage of a survey of two thousand more years of history than was granted to the ancient Stagirite, it cannot be said that they have added very much to his theory, or refuted any of the more important of his generalizations. And it astonishes us when we reflect that between his thought and ours there lie many centuries of the Roman Empire, in which the problems of democracy, on which he pondered so much, had become out of date, and still more centuries of the Dark Ages, in which constitutional history had harked back to that primitive contest between aristocracy and monarchy which recalled struggles that had ended in Greece three hundred years before Aristotle’s day.

But we are concerned not so much with the outlook on the records of mankind that is found in the works of Aristotle, or Dante, or Bacon, or Montesquieu, or Lord Bryce, or any other master mind, as with the generalizations of the man in the street—the average intelligent member of society in one age or another. Herodotus, Livy, Orosius, the authors of the Nuremberg Chronicle, Lamar-tine, or Sir Archibald Alison are the sort of people who give the best evidence as to the historical perspective of their own day.

History, apart from primitive epics and folk-lore tales, starts with the chronicler; and the chronicler is too often annalistic and barren in his first efforts. He tells us without further comment that “Elon the Zebulonite judged Israel for ten years and died, and was buried in Aijalon in the Country of Zebulon”; or observes, as does the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “in the year 773 a fiery cross appeared in the heaven after sunset, and wondrous adders were seen in the land of the South Saxons”—which is interesting but not very informative. But the second stage of chronicling, in which notes and remarks begin to be appended to the plain record of events, is not long in coming. Historical perspective has begun when to the bald annalistic record of an unhappy king we find added that “he did evil in the sight of the Lord, and departed not from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin”; and it is still clearer when the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, shaking off his accustomed brevity, bursts out in indignation against the wickedness of his own day. “The Earth bears no corn; you might as well have tilled the sea: the land is all ruined by evil deeds, and it is said openly that Christ and His saints are asleep.” Such comments imply the beginning of reasoning and judgement; the annalist is making himself the exponent of the thought of his nation, and expresses his opinion as to the consequences of a political policy, or a moral degeneracy, of which he disapproves. The individual has begun to generalize on the aspect of his own time, and presently he will do the same on the aspect of times past and even of times to come. For a consideration of to-day involves in comparison a consideration of yesterday, and probably of to-morrow; and when a man begins consciously to compare yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow he is constructing for himself an historical perspective. It may be only the perspective of his own nation, or even of his own city, or quite possibly of no more than his own class or caste within that nation or city—Hesiod, Theognis, Aristophanes, Juvenal, had all got class or race perspectives, not general ones. Or he may have a world-perspective like Orosius, or Jean Jacques Rousseau, or Karl Marx, or Mr. H. G. Wells, but a perspective entirely settled and circumscribed by his personal predispositions and theories, rather than by true and unprejudiced survey of all the historical evidence that is available for him. And therefore, in endeavouring to arrive at the historical perspective of any age or period, we must (as I said before) be careful not to take the exceptional man as necessarily the best representative of public opinion, when he sets forth his judgements, and the comparison of his own surroundings with those of previous generations or centuries.

The judgement of the man who moralizes on history may be either Optimistic or Pessimistic: which it may be is settled either by the atmosphere of the moment—the thinker’s nation or class or religion may be faring well or faring ill—or by his personal mentality and character. For there have been Optimists in dark ages and Pessimists in times of prosperity.

On the whole Pessimism is the more ancient and universal creed. Impressed by the tales told us by respected grandfathers, most men have been prone to think (with Horace or Hesiod) that they are themselves a degenerate race. All over the world nations have been content to believe in the “Good Old Times”, the “Golden Age”, which has been lost owing to the perversity of the younger generation. Our ancestors were divine or semi-divine. They walked the earth thirty feet high like the Moses of the Talmud, they lived three hundred, four hundred, seven hundred years. They could, like Homer’s Hector, lift a stone which scarce two of the strongest of modern men straining hard could tear from the soil. They bestrode elephants and used palm-trees as walking-sticks. And the earth on which they dwelt was a more genial clime than ours, which produced three harvests a year, and flowed with milk and honey. By some ancestral fault—because Adam and Eve ate the bitter apple of knowledge, or because Pandora opened the fatal box of plagues and diseases, evil finally came upon the human race, and progressive decay has been its lot. Hesiod formalized the conception for the Western World into the scheme of the Five Ages, each worse than that which preceded it, till mankind had slipped from the Golden Age through those of silver and bronze into the age of iron, in which his own unhappy lot was cast. Passed on by Greece to Rome, and by Rome to the Middle Ages, the conception was as popular fifteen centuries after Christ as it had been ten centuries before his birth. And the more pessimistic spirits finished it off with the Séptima Aetas Mundi, which was to sec Antichrist, the destruction of the world, and the Last Judgement—all due in a very few years. For men, it was said, have grown steadily worse: and each particular generation thinks that its own particular faults are so startling that retribution must come without delay.

This conception of mankind as a dwindling race, doomed to a merited extinction, might be considered as a fit product of the most gloomy and sin-burdened ascetics of the Middle Ages. But it is much older than medieval Christianity: the Greeks had the same idea; so had Buddha, who considered the world of matter a hostile thing, and withdrawal from it into Nirvana as the only desirable solution; so had the old Norsemen with their weird conception of “Ragnarok”, the day of the ending of all things, when gods, heavens, and earth should go up in flames, after the powers of hell and destruction had got loose. And this was a much more grim conception than the Christian Last Judgement—since there the just receive their reward, and only the unjust go down to eternal punishment. But if the universe bursts up, gods and all, what has become of the idea of justice?

The conception of the history of the world as a process of consistent deterioration, from a golden age down to a catastrophe well earned by degenerate mankind, is not a very cheerful or inspiring one to guide the way of life. The most obvious deduction from it is, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die”. The average man finds within himself no power to withstand the stream of tendency in which he believes himself carried along toward an unhappy end. He does not even exclaim with Hamlet:

The World is out of joint—O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.

For how few minds even conceive the idea that it is then-duty to stand against the spirit of the times, hard though the task may be. Such minds, of course, there have been in all ages—even in those of chaos and decay, when there was not even a saving religion to promise a reward for resistance to the pressure of an evil world. The Stoics of later Greece and of Roman Imperial times—who, without any faith in the discredited gods of Olympus, stood up to prove that right was right and wrong was wrong, and that the self-respecting man must cling to the right, come what may—were certainly examples of such a type. They lived in a most corrupt and unhappy civilization, their way was certain to be difficult and dangerous, but they were ready to walk in it on first principles and whatever the consequences. Stoics are never numerous—and have been accused of being self-conscious and pedantic by their unsympathizing contemporaries. Nevertheless, they merit our respect.

Their lot was much harder than that of other Pessimists, who like them believed in the degeneracy and wickedness of the world, but stood out against its influence because they were supported by the inspiration of a religion which promised salvation to the individual, though it prophesied destruction for the world. Among them I can include the Buddhist—though his idea of salvation was what seems to most of us a very peculiar one, absorption into the Godhead without the survival of personal identity. But to the Christian or the Mohammedan pessimist the protest against the evil world took the simpler shape of the duty of saving one’s own soul—incidentally the souls of others if possible, but primarily one’s own. This explains the mentality of the early ascetics; St. Simeon Stylites on the top of his 60-foot pillar, or St. Anthony the Hermit in the depths of the Theban desert, eschewed all touch with the wicked world, because they felt themselves unable to convert it, though they might by untold austerities macerate their own sinful bodies so far as to establish an ad misericordtam appeal for pardon from a just but jealous God. This form of Pessimism was as self-regarding as that of the Stoics, and less justifiable, since it ignored the immensity of God’s mercy, and thought only of his omniscience and justice. But it was certainly much less amiable than the asceticism of St. Francis, who with no less profound a belief in the wickedness of the world was able to think of the souls of other men as well as of his own. Nay, he could spare a kindly thought for bird and beast as well as for human sinners. But Francis of Assisi, though an ascetic, was an Optimist, and that makes all the difference between him and Simeon Stylites on his pillar.

The Optimist is a rarer creature than the Pessimist, because enthusiasm is rarer than the grumbling acquiescence in one’s surroundings into which the majority of men slip so easily. Caustic remarks about the worthlessness of one’s contemporaries and the rottenness of one’s milieu are easy things to make. To take arms against the conventions of a settled society requires much more energy than to satirize it. It is also a much more uncomfortable and dangerous occupation in many cases. Moreover, periods when optimism seems justifiable, even to a man of a cheerful disposition, are much less frequent in the world’s history than periods when mankind’s outlook seems gloomy, or at the best doubtful. It is seldom that even the poet can cry out that at this moment to be alive at all is bliss, and to be alive and young is very heaven, as Wordsworth said. It is rare to stand upon some peak in a spiritual Darien and see a new, beautiful, and unknown ocean of possibilities spreading before one. Rarest of all, perhaps, is it to desire to call to the passing hour to stay, because it is so fair.

Yet Optimists there have been, and yet will be, though their optimism is sometimes a little forced, and more often a little illogical. Was Virgil, chanting his song of the glories of the foundation of the Roman race, and the restoration of the Golden Age in the hall of Augustus, a genuine Optimist, or was he but an amiable court-poet singing for his supper? I prefer to believe the former, for I love Virgil; but Augustus was not really a very pleasant person, and I fancy that Virgil knew it. When Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote sweetly of a former age of primitive virtue and innocence, and taught that a future age of a similar sort was possible even for the jaded and artificial folks of the XVIIIth century, was he a prophet or a charlatan? Considering his private character, one is inclined to take his whole attitude for a mere pose. But, if so, it was a pose which deceived a whole generation, and changed the historical perspective of millions of his contemporaries.

But there are other Optimists of whose genuine inspiration one can have no doubt. And first and foremost among them have been those good men who have had before their eyes a religion of universal salvation, rather than a religion which relies on hell-fire as the most efficient item in its propaganda. When one is thoroughly convinced that one is doing one’s best for a righteous cause, which will, and must, triumph in the end, one has a right to be an Optimist, even though incidentally one may have to be a martyr too. One’s personal sufferings count for little, if thereby the cause is advanced, and a just God will not fail to take them into account when one’s good and evil deeds go into the divine scales. Wherefore there have been epochs of primitive faith, and later epochs of revival, when a genuine optimism prevailed, and the good cause went forth conquering and to conquer. The early apostles making their first assault on the heathen world, the friars of the XIIIth century, the Evangelical missionaries overseas in the earlier XIXth century, were all Optimists, inasmuch as they looked forward to conquering the whole world, and not merely to saving some few chosen souls from the damnation to which the rest of mankind might be doomed. And therein they differed from people like Tertullian or the narrow disciples of Calvin, whose conception of Heaven was that of a very small place destined for a very limited number of the Elect, while the sinners in thousands of millions groaned below. I should call these last Pessimists, however sure they might be of the salvation of their own little souls.

But it has not been the times of religious fervour alone that have seen an optimistic outlook on the world. There is such a thing as social and political optimism; and one would be loth to deny the name of Optimist to the XVIIIth-century enthusiasts drafting the “Rights of Man” and dreaming of a second Golden Age to be reached by the simple method of exterminating kings and priests, and relapsing into a supposed “state of nature”. It was of such an outlook that Wordsworth sang:

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country of Romance.
Where Reason seemed the most to assert her rights
When most intent on making of herself
A prime enchantress—to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth
The beauty wore of promise—that which sets
The budding rose above the rose full blown.

Alas for those poor Optimists of 1792, who had before them no golden age but Robespierre and Bonaparte, the Luddites and the “Six Acts”.

A generation later I should not be disposed to deny the name of Optimist to another and a very different set of political enthusiasts—or perhaps one ought not to use the word “enthusiasts”, for enthusiasm was hardly the badge of their tribe—but at any rate highly convinced political dogmatists. I mean those very superior persons, the Whigs of the earlier XIXth century, who thought that a bicameral constitution, with a constitutional monarchy or a president if necessary, was a panacea for all human ills.

There was a wave of genuine optimism passing over Europe when men thought that Greece, Naples, and Portugal needed only the application of the Whig formula to make them happy. Nay, with the substitution of a constitutional president for a king it might even work for Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Honduras. From that easy solution of the difficulties of mankind we are now far away.

How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

Has not Lord Bryce, in his admirable Modern Democracies, confessed, as the last heir of the old Liberal tradition, that constitutions are after all far less important things than national character in the working of a state? The old Liberal Optimist of the XIXth century used to lull himself into a state of beatitude by talking of “Progress”. “We are better than our fathers because we have the railway, the steamer, the electric telegraph, vaccination, improved sanitation, and vote by ballot.” Progress is, he said, inevitable. Evolution is the scientific explanation of the world, and all evolution will be on the right side. This crude theory of optimism overlooks the fact that the close study of history shows that it is not merely evolutionary; it is also not unfrequently cataclysmic—I mean that things sometimes happen which could not have been foreseen by the wisest, and are purely unexpected and not unf...